[comp.dcom.modems] ? How to upgrade ROMS in USR HST-DS?

cbradley@blackbox.lonestar.org (Chris Bradley) (11/21/90)

In several comp.dcom.modems postings over the last few months, I've
seen references to adding ``the new ROMS'' to USR Courier HST Dual
Standard modems, in order to accommodate V.42bis compression.

In response to the ``ATI7'' command, my HST-DS yields the following:
        Configuration Profile...
        
        Product type           External
        Options                HST,V32
        Clock Freq             10.0Mhz
        Eprom                  64k
        Ram                    8k
        
        Supervisor date        02/05/90
        IOP date               05/17/89
        DSP date               09/18/89
        
        Supervisor rev         1.4
        IOP rev                1.0
        DSP rev                2
        R9696 rev              204C

How do I tell if my HST-DS has the V.42bis-capable ROMs installed?  If
these are the ``old'' ROMs, can anyone tell me how I get them upgraded?

Thanks for any help.  I will summarize any responses that I receive to
comp.dcom.modems in a couple of weeks.

weeks
-- 
Chris Bradley			| "I confess freely to you, I could never look 
Businessland Advanced Systems	| long upon a monkey, without very mortifying 
Dallas, Texas US		| reflections." 
cbradley@blackbox.lonestar.org	|		-- WILLIAM CONGREVE 1670-1729

RAF@CU.NIH.GOV ("Roger Fajman") (11/25/90)

It looks to me like you do not have the V.42bis ROMs.  I believe that
they require 32K RAM.  To check for sure contact USR tech support at
800-982-5151.  Be prepared to get several busy signals ant wait on hold
for a while.  If you don't mind paying for the call, 708-982-5151 seems
to get through faster.

schuster@cup.portal.com (Michael Alan Schuster) (11/25/90)

>It looks to me like you do not have the V.42bis ROMs.  I believe that
>they require 32K RAM.  To check for sure contact USR tech support at
>800-982-5151.  Be prepared to get several busy signals ant wait on hold
>for a while.  If you don't mind paying for the call, 708-982-5151 seems
>to get through faster.

Folks who haven't upgraded to V.42bis yet might want to wait just a tad
longer.  All the V.42bis firmware to date (10/2/90 Supervisor chip) have
a serious/fatal bug in negotiating the V.42bis compression dictionary
size at link-up. This only became manifest as newer modems were produced
that created new "test conditions" that the Courier had not been debugged
under. One such modem is the Intel 9600EX. It uses a default dictionary
size that the Courier considers "illegal", and so the negotiation fails.
The Courier assumes a different size, and the next time the Intel asks
for an increase in the dictionary size ("stepup") the Courier panics its
way out of an impossible situation and hangs up.

(My thanks to Toby Nixon, and to the Intel BBS sysop, for these details).
USR calls this the "extra stepup" bug, and they do not yet have new
firmware to fix this. 

I found this bug while calling the 9600EX's that Intel had answering
their BBS. Don't try doing this now ... they presently have a mixture
of USR's and Racal-Vadics answering the phone, while they debug their
TBBS configuration.